Complaining Now, Palin Called Hillary Clinton a Whiner
If nothing else, Sarah Palin has a short memory. Literally days after branding Barack Obama a "socialist" who "pals around with terrorists," Palin responded to her ticket's crushing defeat by announcing, "God bless Barack Obama and his beautiful family." And as she returned to Alaska to complain about the media's accurate reflection of her jaw-dropping ignorance and campaign profligacy, Sarah Palin conveniently forgot having called Hillary Clinton a whiner when it comes to the press.
During a Women and Leadership event back in March, Governor Palin was asked about Senator Clinton's response to media scrutiny - and criticism - she received on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries. Palin made it clear to moderator Karen Breslau of Newsweek that she considered Clinton's conduct unbecoming:
"Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it...When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism or, you know, maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, man, that doesn't do us any good. Women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country. I don't think it's, it bodes well for her -- a statement like that...It bothers me a little bit hearing her bring that attention to herself on that level."
Eight months and one devastating rejection by the American people later, Sarah Palin is singing a different tune. In a series of increasingly bizarre interviews after election day and back in Alaska, the Governor ignored the old maxim that when in a hole, stop digging. Her sullied reputation and beating at the ballot box, she claimed, had nothing to do with her own comical performance as a candidate and everything to do with bias and "gotcha" journalism on the part of the mainstream media.
The morning after the election, Palin's standard practice of blaming the media was back on display. The same woman who hilariously claimed her First Amendment rights were being abridged by the press announced:
"I want to make sure that Americans do understand that there is a little bit of disappointment in my heart about the world of journalism today.
And I don't want any individual journalist to take it personally but--I have such great respect for the role of the media in our democracy, it is a cornerstone, it allows the checks and balances. But only when there is fairness and objectivity in the reporting.
And I want to make sure that Americans can have great faith in that aspect of our society, the media. So whatever I can do there to help and to be able to allow credence to be given to the media, I want to help in that respect. That's where I would start."
On Friday, Palin went a step further in blasting the journalists who trained on her the same media "microscope" she suggested it was natural for Hillary Clinton to experience:
"For the most part, absolutely, media persons, reporters, have been absolutely right on and there has been fairness and objectivity. There have been some stinkers, though, who have kind of made the whole basket full of apples, once in a while, smell kind of bad."
As for her anonymous colleagues on the McCain campaign who decried her ignorance about Africa, NAFTA and so much else while labeling her and her family "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," Sarah Palin ignored her past counsel to Hillary Clinton and took the low road:
"It's mean-spirited, it's immature, it's unprofessional, and those guys are jerks."
That's one possibility. Of course, another is that with her stunning ignorance of policy foreign and domestic, her complete absence of intellectual curiosity and her alarming extremism on social issues, Sarah Palin was a critical ingredient in the defeat of the Republican ticket. But that objective conclusion - as reflected in pre-election surveys and exit polls - may be a bitter pill for her to swallow. The truth, Sarah Palin has apparently concluded, does not always set you free.
When it comes to media objectivity, Sarah Palin would do well to speak less and reflect more on the wisdom of Stephen Colbert. As he told President Bush in 2006, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
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